A Virtual Conference at Amherst College

January 21-23, 2022

“Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet” is an international conference hosted virtually at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College (Massachusetts, USA) on January 21-23, 2022. The conference will bring together scholars and artists working in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and areas connected by the Baltic Sea) and with Baltic musics to document and understand emerging worlds and narratives of Baltic music.

The conference is organized by Jeffers Engelhardt (Amherst College) and Katherine Pukinskis (Amherst College) with support from the Amherst College Department of Music, the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the Amherst College Department of Russian, the Amherst College European Studies Program, and the Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry.


Keynote Speakers

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three speaker photos superimposed over a photo of the Baltic Sea

Meet our Keynote Speakers »


A large rock in a misty ocean with a hazy horizon

Conference Registration

Register for “Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet.” We will circulate access information to conference attendees and participants around January 15, 2022.

Conference Themes

The three-day event will focus on questions of creative and scholarly practice after the “post-Soviet”:

  • What happens as processes of return, reunion, restoration, revival, and reconciliation characterizing “post-Soviet” life in the Baltics give way to new emergencies and urgencies?
  • What happens as generations less impacted by the experience of Soviet occupation and coloniality create sounds and spaces beyond the “post-Soviet”?

For Baltic musicians, musical publics, and scholars working to decolonize national culture, critically rethink ethnolinguistic and racialized identities in musical life, and make scenes and traditions sustainable, the certainty of the “post-Soviet” as “that which we no longer are” is also its limit—always once occupied, once colonized. 


Call for Papers (now closed)

“Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet” explores the chronologies and imaginaries of makers, performers, and scholars creating, naming, inhabiting, and interpreting Baltic worlds after the “post-Soviet.” We invite music- and sound-centered papers and presentations of creative work that address Baltic musics after the “post-Soviet” from practice-based, ethnographic, historical, and comparative perspectives.

See details and how to submit »


Questions?

Contact us »